New Lion’s Butt Award Given To Devout Christian Thinker

Today’s Lion’s Butt Award goes to a self-professed Christian fortunate enough to have his letter printed in today’s Globe. The letter is printed in full below.

The Lion notes that the 1913 law referred to by the writer, whom we will call Mr. Thinker rather than further embarrass him by putting his real name here, stated that no one could be married in Massachusetts if laws in their home state prohibited them from marrying in said home state. The law was a sop to the delicate sensibilities of those devout Southern Christians who believed blacks and whites shouldn’t intermarry, that slavery was good for blacks, and that lynching blacks was a sport second only to baseball in popularity (though in a spirit of ecumenical egalitarianism those enlightened folk did, in 1915, lynch one Jew who had the misfortune to be convicted of a crime in an apparent miscarriage of justice, and after his death sentence was commuted the upright citizens of Marietta, Georgia, hauled him out of his cell and hung him).

Herewith, the letter, indented:

WITH THE repeal of the 1913 law, Massachusetts once again denies the true will of the people. Homosexual marriage is not something that the majority of Bay Staters support. Our activist Supreme Judicial Court and our spineless politicians continue their embarrassing and arrogant ways.

In true Christian fashion Mr. Thinker arrogates to himself the omniscient knowledge of the ‘true will of the people’. He speaks with the thunderous roar of self-approval.

Unfortunately, there’s a small problem with his arrogance. From the Los Angeles Times on July 8, this year:

The political climate in Massachusetts for solidifying gay marriage rights has brightened since 2004. Surveys show that more than half of the state’s voters now accept some form of gay unions. “In poll after poll, the issue has gained mainstream support,” said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk University’s Political Research Center.

Then there’s the matter of the spineless politicians. If Mr. Thinker’s view is correct, then it took a hell of a lot of spine for them to stand against the populace on what Mr. Thinker considers a really hot issue. As for the ‘activist’ court, that’s just Christian and Conservative code for experienced and intelligent judicial practitioners who actually understand and respect the law but completely disagree with the agendas of bigots and haters and would-be tyrants.

Many say “the sky is not falling” in response to the apparent lack of problems caused by this new law. Christians such as myself, and many others, strongly disapprove of homosexual behavior, and even more strongly disapprove of homosexual marriage.

Ah, more Christian code. The falling sky for the Christians and Mr. Thinker was that gay marriage – well, hell, aren’t all marriages supposed to be gay and cheery and happy, except perhaps in the Bible Belt, which has the highest divorce rate of any region in the country – umm, oh, yeah, gay marriage was supposed to destroy the institution of marriage like some foul plague or flaming catastrophe like those released by the Christian god.

Didn’t happen. No heterosexual Christians got divorced because gays got married. Churches didn’t fall down. God didn’t say anything, unless of course he babbled in Mr. Thinker’s ear in the middle of the night and made Mr. Thinker an instrument of his pissed-offedness. The Lion might think from the tone of this letter that that is exactly what happened. But of course The Lion could be wrong.

Mr. Thinker doesn’t like the way gays behave, and likes even less that gays can get married. And then there are the ‘many others’, unnamed and uncategorized, for whom Mr. Thinker has again arrogated to himself the right to speak. But since he and they disapprove, gay behavior must be banned and gay people probably should be punished. As devout as he apparently claims to be, Mr. Thinker may likely believe gays should be killed. After all, his Bible says so somewhere in that mess of hatred, bigotry, and stupidity called Leviticus. And what the hell, that sort of thing worked well for quite a while when Christians took it on themselves to hang and burn and crush women who had some personality problems or mental difficulties or who just disagreed with Christians or who owned something some Christian wanted. Just call them witches and you get to do any sort of brutal, inhumane thing you want and the Bible and your local Christian shaman will back you up. Might as well do it to gays now. What’s the dif?

Unfortunately, once again, Mr. Thinker is out of touch with reality.

June 17, the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll found that 63% of adults say same-sex marriage is “strictly a private decision” between two people.

That the government has the right “to prohibit or allow” such marriages was stated by 33%, and 4% had no opinion.

Mr. Thinker publicly espouses hatred, intolerance, and bigotry, and the denial of civil rights to a minority, and wants us all to sink to his level. Too bad most people don’t want to go there. By Mr. Thinker’s logic, most of the country does not comprise Christians. What a letdown for the poor fellow!

There is a burning opposition to homosexual marriage in Massachusetts and across the country. Politicians are not listening, and activist judges are changing longstanding and time-tested laws that are based in Judeo-Christian beliefs. In the past, revolutions and acts of God were needed to bring down the powerful who would not listen.

Obviously there is not a burning opposition to gay marriage. There would appear to be opposition to burning gays.

As for time-tested laws based on Mr. Thinker’s beliefs, The Lion has to assume that he includes the 1913 law, which was blatantly racist. If that’s true, then Mr. Thinker’s religious beliefs must support all laws supporting segregation of the races, the denial of rights to minorities, the practices of the Inquisition (waterboarding among them), banning the eating of pigs, prohibiting sexual positions not approved by some church or other (no more oral sex, no more women on top), and so on and so forth.

And then Mr. Thinker, because he cannot get his way, because he is not allowed under law to practice his bigotry and hatred, calls for revolution to bring down the government that doesn’t listen to his screeching for blood. He calls down the wrath of his god on innocent people, whether gay or politician or gay politician because they don’t want to do what he tells them to do.

He phrases it as those ‘who would not listen’. The Lion suggests they did listen, and being smarter than Mr. Thinker, decided they didn’t want to continue or to inflict his brand of violence upon the populace.

Maybe the sky has not fallen, but give it some time. There’s a boiling and steadfast opposition that is determined to help rescue our country’s lost soul and skewed values.

Obviously there is opposition, but the only boiling seems to be inside the skulls of Christians like Mr. Thinker, and the opposition is in the minority.

As Governor Deval Patrick said, in what might be construed by Mr. Thinker as an anti-Christian remark worthy of good ol’ Satan himself:

In five years now, … the sky has not fallen, the earth has not opened to swallow us all up, and more to the point, thousands and thousands of good people — contributing members of our society — are able to make free decisions about their personal future, and we ought to seek to affirm that every chance we can,” said the governor.

What Mr. Thinker and his Christian zealots never understand is that the United States has fixed in law that the minority has the same rights as the majority and that it is wrong for the majority to ride roughshod over the minority, any minority. Mr. Thinker seems to think everyone has to live his way or get on the highway to dungeons run by right-thinking Christians like himself. He would appear not to give a damn about the law, or even about his own book of ignorance and superstition, which did have a couple of useful things to say, things like ‘Love one another’ and ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ and ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’.

So, for boiling his brain in hatred and intolerance, for furthering the good name of Christianity everywhere, The Lion awards a double Lion’s Butt Award to today’s letter writer. Way to go, fella!

9 Responses

Something I have noticed in the arguments of many theists is the lack of awareness of any cause and effect relationship. Gays getting married (or mixed race marriages, or abortion, or alcohol, or removing state-sponsered prayer from schools, or petanque, or French Fries, or . . .) causes (will cause) the sky to fall.

At the risk of getting Rhology all hyped up, prove it. If any theist making an argument such as this can give a measurable cause and effect relationship (without resorting to god(s) or a holey tract (Chick Tracts especially)) I will consider the argument.

Supposedly miscegenation would destroy America (one of the arguments was that black men were insatiable and white women would prefer black men). Removing state-sponsored prayer from school would lead to a huge increase in crime (there was an increase in crime, led mainly by the criminilization of even small amounts of recreational narcotics, hallucinogens and appetite enhancers, however the crime rate has been dropping steadily for twenty plus years). Abortion on demand would create free love, destroy marriage, and would mean people procreating with strangers in the public parks. Decriminalizing homosexual behaviour would bring down the wrathe of god(s).

Fine. Show me the statistical proof that these things happened. Then show me the social science linking the behaviour with the professed result. Ain’t gonna happen.

(((Billy))):Something I have noticed in the arguments of many theists is the lack of awareness of any cause and effect relationship.
You’re dead-wrong on this. Theists are “aware” of a cause-effect relationship:
Cause = God
Effect = Anything They Want It To Be.

It doesn’t happen to be a cause-effect relationship that makes any sense, but they’re “aware” of it. And they’re trying to force you to be aware of it, too.

As one comment above notes, arguments against same-sex marriage are nearly identical to those used to condemn “inter-racial” marriage. Discrimination against both have been justified by tradition based on “natural law”, and the opponents of both types of marriage have used the Bible to justify legislated discrimination. Both have attempted to add to the Constitution words governing which types of marriage the state may sanction, yet both claim their efforts to exclude certain types of citizens from marriage are somehow “non-discriminatory”. The parallel is uncomfortably close, as anti-miscegenation laws have only recently been repealed across the United States.

A history of discrimination
In the 1660s, Maryland became the first colony to prohibit interracial marriages. By 1750, all the southern colonies as well as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania made interracial marriages illegal.

In Maryland, when slavery was introduced in 1664, “the law also prohibited marriages between white women and black men…. between 1935 and 1967, the law was extended to forbid marriage between Malaysians with blacks and whites. The law was finally repealed in 1967.”

During the 1950s, half of the states still had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. By the early 1960’s at least 41 states had enacted anti-miscegenation statutes.

“Miscegenation violates God’s Law (natural Law) of reproduction, no matter how much Billy Graham and his ilk put their seal of approval on it. This inter-mingling is unknown to all other species. It is only man who interferes with God’s law.

As the New York Times (Feb. 23, 1911, p. 23) phrased it: The “white and black races should live apart. Their hybridization forms a degenerate type; anthropologists declare that some of the most cruel and treacherous specimens of humanity are to be found among “mottled” negroes.”

This type of legal marriage must be forbidden, said a Republican senator from Wisconsin, “simply because natural instinct revolts at it as wrong.”

Attempts to Amend to the Constitution

In 1871, Representative Andrew King (D-Missouri) was the first politician in Congress to propose a constitutional amendment to make interracial marriage illegal nation-wide. King proposed this amendment because he feared that the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 to give equal civil rights to the emancipated ex-slaves (the Freedmen) as part of the process of Reconstruction, would render laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional.

In December 1912 and January 1913, Representative Seaborn Roddenbery (D-Georgia) again introduced a proposal in the United States House of Representatives to insert a prohibition of miscegenation into the US Constitution and thus create a nation-wide ban on interracial marriage.

”Let this condition go on if you will,” Mr. Roddenberry warned. ”At some day, perhaps remote, it will be a question always whether or not the solemnizing of matrimony in the North is between two descendants of our Anglo-Saxon fathers and mothers or whether it be of a mixed blood descended from the orangutan-trodden shores of far-off Africa.”

A U.S. representative from Georgia declared that allowing this type of marriage “necessarily involves (the) degradation” of conventional marriage, an institution that “deserves admiration rather than execration.”

“The next step will be (the demand for) a law allowing them, without restraint, to … have free and unrestrained social intercourse with your unmarried sons and daughters,” warned a Kentucky congressman. “It is bound to come to that. There is no disguising the fact. And the sooner the alarm is given and the people take heed, the better it will be for our civilization.”

Attorneys for the state of Tennessee argued that such unions should be illegal because they are “distasteful to our people and unfit to produce the human race.” The state Supreme Court agreed, declaring these types of marriages would be “a calamity full of the saddest and gloomiest portent to the generations that are to come after us.”

The Bible says it is wrong.

According to the Community Relations Coordinator at Bob Jones University, which prohibited inter-racial dating as late as 2000:

“God has separated people for His own purpose. He has erected barriers between the nations, not only land and sea barriers, but also ethnic, cultural, and language barriers. God has made people different one from another and intends those differences to remain.. Bob Jones University is opposed to intermarriage of the races because it breaks down the barriers God has established. It mixes that which God separated and intends to keep separate. Every effort in world history to bring the world together has demonstrated man’s self-reliance and his unwillingness to remain as God ordains. The attempts at one-worldism have been to devise a system without God and have fostered the promotion of a unity designed to give the world strength so that God is not needed and can be overthrown.

The people who built the Tower of Babel were seeking a man-glorifying unity which God has not ordained (Gen. 11:4-6). Much of the agitation for intermarriage among the races today is for the same reason. It is promoted by one-worlders, and we oppose it for the same reason that we oppose religious ecumenism, globalism, one-world economy, one-world police force, unisex, etc. When Jesus Christ returns to the earth, He will establish world unity, but until then, a divided earth seems to be His plan.”

There are many verses in support of this position, just as there are in support of those who want to legislate their dislike of homosexuality. Well, there are not nearly as many that seem to condemn homosexuality.

In sum, therefore:

“Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, Malay, and red and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix.”

– Judge Bazile, Caroline County, VA, 1965

Should Christians have seen through this pseudo-Biblical nonsense? How could Christians 140 years ago, or even 40 years ago, have discerned the truth about these hateful statements and these false Biblical arguments?

They could have seen through the hatred if they had only taken to heart the words of the man they call the savior: if they had applied the litmus test of Jesus. Jesus called on his followers to judge whether or not a religious teaching brought “good fruit” or “bad fruit.”

They should see through the anti-homosexual bigotry masquerading as Christianity.

Possible objections to this analogy between same-sex and inter-racial marriage.

1. The two can’t be compared (for some reason).

2. The Bible really isn’t against inter-racial marriage, even though it was so used for hundreds of years, but it really is against same-sex marriage. Really, it is, even though Jesus said nothing about homosexuality.